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Lilliana Afghan

Payment Q&A’s

Why is there tax added to my patterns at checkout?

Different locations have different laws regarding tax requirements on Digital Downloads – more commonly known as digital products tax. It does not matter where the vendor (us) is located, certain countries require that we charge tax at your national tax rate and pay that over to your revenue authority.

The EU require these that these taxes are levied no matter the vendors turn over, while other countries have annual turn over thresholds before any taxes are paid. For South Africans – we are registered with SARS so have to charge all South Africans VAT on checkout.

This applies to all market places like Etsy or Ravelry. In some cases the vendor might include the tax in the displayed selling price, others might add it on checkout – this depends on the system or how the system verifies your geo-location for taxation.

We have to keep inline with the law – so we have to keep tax on track as required or risk large fines and prohibitions on sales into certain areas and we don’t want you to miss out on being able to get our patterns, so its tax or nothing.

Like they say – death and taxes.

I am a South African - why can I not use Paypal in the pattern store?

Paypal currently do not process Rands, meaning transactions have to be based in an international currency and then converted to Rands. This increases costs for you as the credit card company charges you a selling rate (a higher exchange rate than the buying and SARB exchange you see advertised in the news) and a commission.

So to avoid added expenses – we implemented Payfast as a payment gateway – which allow you to purchase patterns in Rands using your credit card, debit card or instant EFT.

When Paypal directly process in Rands, we will implement it as a option in our pattern store for South Africans, in the meantime its geo-specific to international Sunshiners until then.

Why can I not pay by Debit Card?

Globally only certain debit cards work on certain payment platforms. If you are a South African – you can usually pay through payfast, if your debit card is with Nedbank, Absa or Standard bank.

Certain international debit cards can be used with paypal – again though – this is limited to certain banks and countries only.

We are doing our best to increase all the options we have for accepting payments to make it as convenient as possible, and will keep you up to date as the options are added.

Why is my currency not listed? I only see US dollars?

We are working on expanding the scope of currencies we show on our-site and those that we can accept with the payment gateways we have. In the mean time, we have US dollars listed for all territories not covered in our current basket of currencies.